(P1): Driven behavior always biases risk assessment

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Some adolescent males reliably do very dangerous and stupid things that violate common sense. A meaningful number die as a result. They do so because they are driven to show off. They don’t think about getting hurt or dying, they don’t assess the cost of their death on those who care about them, they don’t pay any attention to who else will be hurt. They do this because they are driven to take risks and pay no attention to the actual uncertainty of injury. In the decision-making moment, they have no common sense.

Lest you think that this is only an issue for teenage boys, let me remind you that all driven behavior whether toward or away from something (drugs, sex, rock and roll, mountain climbing, extreme sports, casual investment, gambling, and all the subsidiary behaviors that go along with driven behavior, as well as all fear-driven choices) reliably produce an ignoring of risk and uncertainty or severe underestimation or overestimation of it.

This lack of respect for real uncertainty and the acceptance of the real uncertainty in life becomes especially damaging when the decision makers have no “skin in the game”, which is to say when someone else pays the price for their decisions. There are so many examples of this, and there are so many new ones that surface every day, I won’t bother to give examples.